


Downtime

by greyathena



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-05-01 05:10:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5193464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyathena/pseuds/greyathena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve and Flynn navigate this new thing they're doing, now that their LITs have left the nest.  Or, how Flynn learns the real value of the alone part.</p><p>(A standalone unrelated to previous stories; intended to fit with season 2 canon)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Downtime

Their first "date" (she really couldn't commit to dropping the imaginary quotation marks, not when by "date" he technically meant "work") was exactly as chaotic as she would have guessed a Flynn-led attempt on a clippings book case would be.

Eve recognized the name of the small, coastal New England town as soon as they arrived, though she couldn't remember why. It was Flynn who nearly tripped over a little pile of stones that looked like a cairn - old, very old, gray irregular stones with years' worth of water and weather erosion, and a half-buried line of more stones on the ground leading away. Flynn found the next one too, with another line leading them in the same direction, due north . . .

"Ley lines!" Eve exclaimed when it finally came to her. "That's where I knew the name of the town from. Jenkins's map of the ley lines. One of them runs right through here."

Flynn froze in place, staring out over the distant ocean. "Those cairns aren't old enough to be original, they're not Viking-era, but if someone in the seventeenth century had discovered the line . . . but what does it mean? Why call a Librarian here now?"

Eve shrugged. "I'm just the one with a good memory for maps. Weird magic stuff is all you." Of course Flynn and his eidetic memory could have done this alone, if he'd ever seen the complete maps. But he hadn't, so at least she got to feel useful.

Was she supposed to feel useful on a date?

"That one's wrong," Flynn said suddenly. "The line - it _bends_ , it's like . . ." He was twisting his body over at the waist as though bending himself would help him to figure it out. "There should be a second line offshore - if the curve were right - if you could move the lines, could you get them to intersect, or . . . converge?"

If Cassandra were there, she'd be seeing curves and angles in the sky and they'd have their answer to a mathematical exactness within seconds. Pointing this out seemed somewhat tactless, so instead she said, "The ones in Europe had moved."

Flynn spun around as if he'd forgotten she was there. "By themselves?"

"I think." She frowned. "Maybe not. Maybe the haunted house pulled them in."

The mention of a haunted house sailed right past Flynn, who was still bending awkwardly and frowning down the path ahead. "Someone's doing this on purpose - let's see why."

He took her hand as they walked, which was cute (and rather more date-like), and then eventually there was a sloppily moved cairn, and some weird sizzling energy across their path, and in the end an aspiring warlock raising a monstrous supernatural whale from the deep, which was less cute. Fortunately, Eve was able to disrupt the spell by using her phone's compass as a guide to reposition the bent ley line, while Flynn distracted the warlock and the giant whale (by, she was pretty sure, shouting bits of _Moby Dick_ at them on the rocky beach).

Once his spell was broken and the roaring of wind and water and angry whale had died down, the warlock got one look at Eve's drawn gun and just ran for it. "Should we follow him?" she asked, brushing saltwater-misted hair out of her eyes.

Flynn stared out over the sea, muttering, "In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. Helm there; steady, as thou goest . . ."

"Okay," Eve said. "Was that a yes, or am I still speaking to Ahab?"

"Sorry." Flynn blinked a few times. "I think he's learned his lesson. He actually looked a little scared of the thing anyway."

"Scared of a giant whale-monster, imagine that."

He slipped an arm around her waist. "Good job with the ley line."

"Exactly how many times have you read _Moby Dick_?" she asked. 

"A few."

"You wanted to be a sea-captain, didn't you?"

"That or a pirate."

His face was close to hers, close enough that she could smell and almost taste the saltwater on his skin, and she realized this was the date part just in time to be actually prepared for his kiss. The first one was tentative, going no further than their previous kisses, but the second was much different - deep, and hard, her fingers in his damp hair, his hand at her lower back pulling her hips against his. She broke away - with effort - when his hands started to slide lower, and murmured, "Flynn, we're in public."

"It's about to rain," he said, although he obediently moved his hands to her hips. "No one's going to come out here."

"Except all the people who just saw a giant whale out their windows, and are definitely going to come and look."

"Bastards," he muttered against her forehead.

She laughed and kissed him again, chastely. "Come on. Let's go back to the Annex and get dry. You're getting a little sunburned anyway."

He opened his eyes and really looked properly at her then, and brushed a fingertip over her nose. "You too."

Back home she found a dry shirt in her gym bag and teased him out of his damp jacket, and over dinner they found themselves puzzling out which of Flynn's leads in the search for the Library had been real and which had been planted by Dulaque, with Flynn drawing maps of the Middle East on a cocktail napkin and Eve occasionally taking the pen away and forcing his fork into his hand (handle-first, although she threatened him with the tine-end twice when he refused to stop sketching dimensional rifts and take at least _one bite I'm not kidding_ ).

He tasted wonderfully of both wine and the ocean when he kissed her later, and part of her really, really wanted to let his hesitantly roaming hand continue its path up under her shirt and finally find out what it would be like - but not, certainly, in the card catalogue. And the rest of her knew that while she wanted it now, later she'd feel like they'd rushed. The number of days she'd actually spent in his presence could still be counted on her fingers, after all.

She disengaged gently and, in response to his questioning look, said with a smile, "I'm not really a first-date girl."

"Of course you're - I mean, I didn't think - I wasn't -" He huffed out a quick, embarrassed breath. "I should go write in the log book. About the whale."

His bright red color was definitely not all sunburn.

She sort of wondered if they'd talk about it, but the next day there were _two_ new entries in the clippings book. Flynn justifiably decided they should investigate the zoo where the animals were all spontaneously turning into creatures from myth (two zookeepers and an oryx had already fallen prey to a chimera and some kind of Leviathan, so things were dire), and leave the smaller note about a mysterious theft at an antique bookstore for one of the other Librarians to examine when they were finished in Peru.

And, there was a dragon (and this one didn't speak Latin, either) and some kind of crocodile-headed thing and a unicorn, which Eve was not initially concerned about until it tried to gore her, and then she remembered her legends and was almost too busy blushing to notice the Sphinx.

So it was a busy day. One that ended with her spraying Solarcaine on a dragon burn on the side of Flynn's neck while Jenkins scrolled through photos she'd taken on her phone of the animals (hopefully) returned to their original forms.

There was one pouffy mouse-thing that still didn't look right to her.

Their third . . . outing was to a small, extremely private tourist resort on one of the smaller Caribbean islands. At first she suspected this was an actual _date_ , i.e. a ruse to whisk her off for a romantic weekend (and by "romantic" she probably actually meant "thoroughly debauched"), especially when the resort manager seemed to know Flynn. But then the man started babbling about witches and storms and he was so thoroughly terrified that it was clear this was an actual case.

He did assign them a bungalow, though, and Eve was glad that Flynn had warned her to pack because it was clear this wasn't a drive-by mission. The frightened manager hadn't been able to tell them much, and neither could anyone else. It was clear they were going to have to wait for dark and see the now-daily supernatural storm for themselves.

This, predictably, did not sit well with Flynn.

"So we just _wait_?" he asked as a skittish local man left them on the porch of their bungalow. 

"Sounds that way," Eve replied. She was eyeing a fairly comfortable-looking hammock on the end of the porch. Chasing a unicorn around the zebra paddock had definitely left her a bit on the sore side.

"The entire island is terrified of a giant, monstrous storm that practically brings on the apocalypse every night, and all we can do is sit around and wait for it to happen?"

"Some downtime wouldn't be a terrible thing," she said. "We've been running nonstop since we got the Library back."

"Downtime?" he repeated incredulously. "What's the point of-"

He had paced his way in front of the hammock. Eve sized up her angles carefully. Either this was going to work, or she was going to give him a concussion.

"I mean there has to be something we can be -"

With one foot propped on the near side of the hammock to (hopefully) keep it from tipping, she shoved him hard in the middle of the chest. _Success._ He fell back and landed in the hammock without either flipping it over or cracking his head.

She'd barely even broken his rhythm. 

"There's obviously something causing it - someone on this island knows where that storm is coming from, and why, and there's investigating to be done - _you're_ always saying we have to investigate when we arrive on the scene -"

In the middle of his rant she placed a knee beside him on the hammock, both hands gripping the sides, and carefully climbed in next to him. It took some work, but she managed to settle along his body with her head resting on his chest without dumping them over.

She had, actually, a lot of questions and doubts as to how he would react, which was a large part of why she'd done it in the first place. He loved the adventure, loved running around chasing monsters and fighting evil magic with her. He enjoyed, she was really coming to learn, their passionate kisses in the heat of the moment, and she was one hundred percent sure he was interested in more passion and more heat. Probably with a dragon still flying overhead, if possible.

What she wasn't sure about was what he really felt, underneath the adventure and the excitement. All fun and sex? Or anything else?

He might be cold and stiff. He might, in fact, climb out of the hammock and inadvertently tip her onto the ground mid-rant, which was very easy to picture.

What he did was immediately wrap his arms around her, tightly, and hook one leg over her ankles and bend his face over her head. What he did not do was miss a beat.

"There's evidence to track down," he said, somewhat muffled as he was nuzzling her hair while he spoke. "Clues and pieces of the puzzle which it is our duty to dig up before the storm hits again -"

His hands were rubbing soothing patterns up and down her arms. Content for the moment, Eve just rested against him and let him continue.

"The value of just sitting around and waiting for something to happen when we can be - and I mean what's the point anyway, what can - oh."

The stop was so sudden that she almost missed it. She lifted her head a tiny bit off his chest and asked, "Oh?"

"I see," he said. There was a moment of quiet while he pressed little kisses to her hairline, and she wondered what it was that he saw. "This is good," he said finally.

"What is?"

He pressed her closer to him. "This."

"Oh." Well. Good.

"I mean I see your point. We can't exactly do this if we're running _all_ the time."

Which seemed to indicate he saw some value in doing this at all. She burrowed her face into his shirt with pleasure.

After a comfortable silence, during which he took one of her hands in his and raised it to his lips for a series of light, teasing kisses, he said, "You need this."

It was sort of a question but not quite. She stretched her head back so that she was looking up - really just at the underside of his jaw - and asked, "What do you mean?"

"Well." It took him another little while to put words to his thoughts. "I haven't had anyone to travel with in a while. The, uh, the running around, that's my life, that's - it's just great to have you with me. That's all I really thought I - but you, uh. This, the - feelings stuff. You need that. Don't you."

"I guess," she said quietly. "I think - we probably both do." She was suddenly aware of a familiar position, a memory of expecting feelings to be returned that weren't, of asking for things she wasn't going to get . . . a little shamefacedly she pushed herself up on her elbow as best she could. "I mean - I shouldn't make assumptions. Maybe all the - the fun and sex part is all you want, I don't mean to judge, if you don't feel -"

"No, no, come here," he said, pulling her back down against him. The hammock rocked but remained upright. "Of course I feel - I have feelings for you. Not just - I mean, I have no _problem_ with fun or sex. At all."

She snorted a little.

Softly he said, "I haven't done this much."

She didn't know whether he was talking about taking a moment to stop rushing around, or whether he was actually referring to cuddling with another person. Knowing his history, either was possible. "You're not much for slowing down," she said neutrally.

He stroked the side of her face for a few breaths before answering. "You know, I used to fight Judson for time to myself. And Charlene. I was trying so hard to have a regular -" Underneath her, she felt his shrug. "Doesn't really work for Librarians. And now Judson's gone . . ."

"So you send yourself on mission after mission, since he can't?"

"What else was there?" His hand was under her chin, gently lifting. "Kiss me?"

She had to stretch, and he had to bend down, since positions were hard to adjust in the hammock. But they managed it, a slow, sweet kiss as the air started to smell like rain and ozone, and a wind picked up around them.

It turned out that "witch-storm" was an incredibly accurate description. There was a storm, and there were literal witches. On broomsticks.

"Are witches on brooms a thing in the Caribbean?" Eve shouted over the wind as they stood on a boat launch watching the sky turn green and yellow and brown.

"No," he yelled back. "This is definitely some cross-cultural interference. We should probably get out in one of those rowboats so we can be right in the middle of it!"

" _What_?" she yelled around the strands of hair that the wind had blown into her mouth.

He grinned. "Just wanted to see your face!"

By the time they'd sent Jenkins some blurry pictures, the storm was actually dying down, taking with it the sounds of lightning and thunder and crashing waves and screaming. The smell of rain stayed, but the air was cooler and less humid now.

"We'll have to wait till tomorrow to talk to Jenkins's friend in Salem," Eve said, watching Flynn carefully for a reaction, but he was perfectly happy now that he'd gotten to stand in the middle of a witch-storm and get blown about and buffeted by wave spray. At least he was, however temporarily, easy to please.

Once they were shut inside their shared bungalow, with the leftover storm winds blowing the scents of rain and bougainvillea through the windows, it seemed right and easy to fall into quiet, soft kisses that gradually grew more urgent and needy. Their clothes were damp (again) and Eve pulled her shirt off unselfconsciously and let Flynn sweetly brush a row of kisses across her collarbones as she undid his buttons. Their clothes landed on the floor in a disarray she wouldn't usually have been able to leave alone, but for right now this was about hands and mouths and skin and getting, quite naturally, to the part of the "fun and sex" they'd so far been missing.

They could have gone home and come back the next day, but home was Jenkins and the bright lights of the Annex, not tropical rain and the sound of night birds and the tiny flickering light of one lantern on the table. There was a last feeble roll of distant thunder as Flynn, trailing kisses over her chest, nudged one of her legs up so that her foot rested on a chair rung, giving him the perfect angle to press his fingers into her. She actually threw her head back at the sensation, gripping his shoulders for balance and support; but he pulled her back to him with his other arm securely behind her shoulders and buried his face in her neck. For a moment he paused his movements, and wonderingly whispered close to her ear, "I can feel your pulse."

There was very little she could say to that, especially as she was busy moaning softly into his hair, so she just turned her head and kissed him in between ragged breaths.

The bed was low, and Flynn sat on the edge of it to pull her in close and press his mouth to her belly before moving lower. He stayed sitting just like that, her lowering herself over his lap, as they finally got to where they'd been going since Berlin and New York and Munich and Portland . . . It took a while to find a shared rhythm, but they fit, and in the meantime she was enjoying the sight of his fingers clasping hers on his shoulder, and the feel of his slow open-mouthed kisses on her neck.

He finished first, holding her tight around the waist and gasping against her shoulder, but barely let himself recover before he was stroking her with sure fingers. As close as she was, she still managed to see that he was a little too sensitive to be comfortable still inside her, so she moved off him and stretched out on the bed. He followed gratefully and proceeded to demonstrate that gratitude until she was spent and satisfied and holding him still against her.

At around three in the morning she woke and found him, and the lantern, gone, and she dressed in dry clothes and took her flashlight out to the boat launch where she found him peering at swirls of sand blown across the damp boards by the storm.

"Did you think of something, or could you just not sleep?" she asked, her voice rough with sleep and screaming into the storm winds and gasping his name for what had felt like an hour.

He reached a hand up to clasp hers. "Both. Look at this."

She looked. "It looks like waves."

"That pattern isn't natural. The sand should just have been equally distributed."

"Does it mean something?"

"I don't know." He squatted there in silence, frowning at the sand. "It should. I think it should."

The night had grown chillier than she expected, and she shivered a little in her thin shirt. "Come back to bed and think about it," she said. "And try to sleep."

"I don't think I can, it's - it's something, _right there_ , and I can't - I'm not going to be able to sleep if -" But he had pushed himself up to standing, carrying the lantern.

She clicked off her flashlight and leaned into his shoulder. "Even if we tire you out first?"

"Oh." He bent his face to her hair, and she heard him take a deep breath. "Well. It's worth a shot."

With a laugh, she draped her arm around his shoulders. "Come on, Librarian. Let's see what we can do."

As they walked back along the dark path to the bungalow, his non-lantern hand tucked into the pocket of her jeans, he said, "You know, I have insomnia a lot."

That time she laughed so hard that she was afraid of waking the other guests.


End file.
